We had a lunch meeting and I didn’t know what he looked like, but when he walked in with his manager I immediately felt a connection and thought: “That’s gotta be him.” I visited him in his flat in London and he played me the songs on the instruments he wrote them on, to get the dodgy demos out of my mind. James’s demo tape was all over the place, but You’re Beautiful and Goodbye My Lover were on there. I figured that if she was crazy enough to sign a new artist from SXSW I might be crazy enough to record him. She’d just had a couple of big hits with Pink and Christina Aguilera. A few days later I heard that Linda Perry was looking for me to produce a new artist. He sounded pretty interesting, but then I promptly forgot all about him. I watched South by Southwest on the internet and saw James. Photograph: Chris Jackson/Getty Images Tom Rothrock, producer
Mobbed … James Blunt crowd surfs at the Invictus Games opening ceremony in London, 2014. Without You’re Beautiful, it’d be a tour of north London. I sang it at Elton John and David Furnish’s civil ceremony and I’m about to start my sixth world tour. The song became so ubiquitous that it started to irritate people, but I’m still proud of it and I love my job. I thought I’d just be a musician putting out music. I had no idea the song would be such a big hit, and it scared me at first. I had to jump twice because the first take wasn’t right, and I ended up with a split lip. They had divers in the water in case I knocked myself unconscious. By the time I got there, I realised I’d made a terrible mistake but it was too late to back out. The tube certainly looked very colourful.įor the video I agreed to jump off a cliff in Mallorca. I sing “my life is brilliant” twice, which is my little joke, but I think in my elated state, from whatever concoction I might have taken at the time, life did seem really brilliant. I tried “particularly high”, “especially high”! Eventually I sang “flying high” on the radio edit but wanted the released version left as it was. The label asked me to remove the words “fucking high” from You’re Beautiful. Linda Perry was there and said she wanted to sign me to her new label. I played it on the 25th floor of a hotel at the South by Southwest festival in Texas. But everyone has those moments where you wonder: “What if I’d said something?” It’s about a guy (me) who’s high and stalking someone else’s girlfriend on the subway.
It’s always been portrayed as romantic, but it’s actually a bit creepy. I went to see my songwriter friend Sacha Skarbek in Los Angeles, and, with Amanda Ghost as a co-writer, we finished the song. Our eyes met, but we just walked past each other, and I went home and wrote the words to You’re Beautiful in two minutes. One day I was on the underground in London and saw an ex-girlfriend with her new boyfriend.
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